Details

At: 22/11/2024 3:00pm, in cooperation with: MSA Memory and Activism Working Group

Speakers:

Vasiliki Belia
Silas Udenze
Paula Tortosa

Current Debates on the Memory-Activism Nexus: Perspectives from the Memory and Activism Working Group - Panel #1, moderated by: Clara Vlessing

A year after the 2023 MSA roundtable on the “activist turn” in memory studies, how have ideas about the relationship between memory and activism evolved? How has new research into the formation and circulation of activist memories shaped our understanding of collective remembrance, and what new methods have emerged for studying memory in collective action? In this first of two dMSA sessions, the Memory and Activism Working Group (MAWG) brings together early career researchers to explore new cases, approaches, and challenges to the “memory-activism nexus” (Rigney, 2018). This first session focuses on the memory of activism: What qualities make an activist or movement ‘memorable’? What narrative, visual, or performance forms best lend themselves to the remembrance of activism? How are memories of activism shaped by changing media ecologies? Amid expanding international literature on the memory-activism nexus, this session amplifies the voices of early career researchers conducting fundamental research on memory and activism in diverse contexts

Presenters

Paula Tortosa is a Psychologist from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) in Argentina. Specialist in Gender Studies and Policies from the National University of Tres de Febrero. Master’s in Epidemiology, Health Management, and Policies from the National University of Lanús (UNLA). Doctoral candidate in Social Sciences at University of Buenos Aires. CONICET doctoral scholarship fellow with the research topic “Performative Interventions on State Terrorism in Argentina.”

Silas Udenze is an interdisciplinary researcher of Humanities and Communication at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. His research interests cut across social movements, digital activism and memory, digital ethnography, African studies, and qualitative methods. He has published in top peer-reviewed journals such as Media, War and Conflict, Memory Studies, Communication and the Public. He is a Research Fellow at the Center of Digital Anthropology (CDA), University College London. He is a member of the Digital Ethnography Working Group (DEWG) at Rutgers University, United States.

Vasiliki Belia is a PhD candidate at Maastricht University. Her research interests include gender studies, comics studies, cultural memory and social movements. Her project, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), studies contemporary comics that remember figures and campaigns of twentieth-century feminism. She has published two open-access peer-reviewed articles (Memory Studies 2024, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture 2023) and a book chapter (Transitions in Art, Culture and Politics, Amsterdam University Press 2023) on this subject. She has curated the exhibition Graphic Sapphic: Lesbian Comics from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands 1970s-1990s (2023) at IHLIA LBGT Heritage, Amsterdam.

Chair

Clara Vlessing is an interdisciplinary scholar in the humanities, currently working as a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO NWA-ORC project Heritages of Hunger at Radboud University. Trained in comparative literature, she looks at the relationship between memory and social movements with particular attention to the role of gender. She teaches cultural analysis across media; theories of memory, decolonisation and gender; and creative and academic writing. In 2023 she defended her PhD “Remembering Revolutionary Women: The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst”. Since 2022 she has been co-chair of the Memory Studies Association’s Memory and Activism Working Group. Her expertise on the cultural remembrance of radical women is reflected in peer-reviewed articles (Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 2021, Social History/Histoire Sociale 2023), book chapters (The Visual Memory of Protest, AUP 2023) and a forthcoming co-edited collection (Remembering Contentious Lives, Palgrave).